Westerns, con e senza Spaghetti

I just finished watching For a Few Dollars More and it made me realize why I love High Noon so much.

For the longest time I wondered why Marshall Kane, the good guy, is dressed in black while Frank Miller, the bad guy, was dressed in white. I was perplexed as to how to explain such a blatant misuse of an archetype: good=white, black=bad. (I mean that strictly in the context of movies and art, not in terms of race. I mean, seriously, without blues, most music today would suck.) I thought it was to illustrate that in the old west, everything becomes backwards, even with a Marshall willing to enforce the law. Now I realize that they did it to illustrate that, under societal forces, even the law can become the villain (shout out to everybody’s favorite senator, Senator McCarthy).

While Kane is doing exactly what needs to be done, what is legal, righteous, etc, Miller has the town’s support. No one is willing to stand up against Miller because they don’t want to harm themselves. Essentially, Miller has their approval to kill Kane and Kane stands in the wrong. Losing one Marshall would be better than standing up for what they believe in and losing a couple men with families. They see the injustice at hand–simply the injustice of a gun battle ruining their town’s reputation–and that if they get involved, they become a member of the guilty party. Thus, Miller and his boys are dressed as the people in the right and Kane is chased down and hunted as the offender.

I don’t really understand how For a Few Dollars More helped me understand that other than the fact that it got me to thinking about how awesome A Fistful of Dollars was. That, in turn, made me realize that Once Upon a Time in the West was probably as close as one could get to a perfect western, which got me thinking about High Noon because it probably is the perfect western.

Therefore, without having seen High Noon in at least a year or two, a Spaghetti western convinced me that the best western I have seen was made in America. Also, Grace Kelly is crazy hot.